July 2009

MT 4.3: Faster Performance, Powerful Search, More Page Views

Today marks the official release of Movable Type 4.3. While we’ve been previewing the features over the last week, below is a hit list of the biggest features. If you’re looking to download MT Pro, click here. Smarter Search and Pagination We’ve added several new ways to drill down your search (author, category and date), which lays the groundwork for the ability to paginate your index and archives. With a static first page and dynamic additional pages, your site gets the added page views with faster publish times. Additionally, we’ve added the ability to paginate comments, which will dramatically improve publish times on prolific comment threads. Entry Asset Manager MT’s smarter than ever with the way it handles assets like photos, which means it’s much easier to make slideshows and editing entries that use assets is even faster, with more control over your code. Read more » Summary Object Framework This is our first step in dramatically improving performance for our largest MT installations. This framework allows MT’s core codebase and plugins to store arbitrary summary information in the database, replacing expensive calculation queries with fast primary-key lookups against summary tables. The framework includes a flexible mechanism for invalidating summary…

Features of 4.3: Smarter Blog Cloning

Up until the general release of MT 4.3, we are publishing details on the features of 4.3. Today we’ll focus on blog cloning. For quite some time, blog cloning has been built into Movable Type. It was created to help add a new blog without having to recreate templates, categories or anything else. The problem was that most often there was never the need to clone everything in a blog. Movable Type 4.3 has added some new features to the cloning process: Ability to omit specific content from the cloning process. The following content can be omitted: Entries/Pages Categories/Folders Comments Trackbacks It may seem like a minor addition, but it can save precious time while developing a site. Ability to specify critical blog settings for the new blog before cloning to prevent accidentally overwriting existing content. The following fields may be set before cloning: blog name path URL Several more checks (e.g., a confirmation page, better defaults) have been added to make this process rock solid. Personally, it has already made testing and setting up a few new installations much easier and faster. I hope this feature will scratch an itch for many of the Movable Type consultants out there….

Features of 4.3: Entry Pagination

Up until the general release of MT 4.3 (beta info here), we are publishing details on the features of 4.3. Today we’re looking at entry pagination. 1,000 Entries One of the categories on my blog is now up to nearly 1,000 entries and it has become difficult to display them. Movable Type offers the ability to split up the category content by date (e.g., Category-Monthly archives), but that would still require me to publish all of the content statically. I could use dynamic publishing, but then I would lose the speed of a statically published page on the front-end. Situations like these, and a long-standing pubilc request, is why we’re now introducing a dynamic way to paginate your index and archive templates using MT-Search. With this solution, you’re able to publish the first 10 or 20 (or whatever you’d like) entries statically and paginate through the remainder dynamically. What’s even better is that it only requires a few changes to your index or archive template to generate the content for MT-Search. Getting Pagination on Your Blog We’ve put together a guide to paginating with static templates that provides details on the new querystring parameters and sample template code. It’s based…

Features of 4.3: Entry Asset Manager

On Monday, Beau posted about our effort to update the docs for MT 4.3. Today I’m coming to you with information on one of our new features — the entry asset manager. An Easier Way Up until now, the only way to associate an image with an entry was to place it in the entry body. Upon save, Movable Type would write that association to the database. In order to do this, there a form tag was placed around the image (that was stripped out when you published), which was confusing to many. In 4.3, we decided to make this relationship clearer and easier to manage. As you can see to your right, every image associated with this entry is listed in a new sidebar widget on the edit entry page. Hovering over the image shows you a thumbnail. Clicking on ‘Add New’ in the widget only adds the image to the list, not the entry body. This means you can now use the mt:EntryAssets tag to access assets without inserting them into the entry body. Of course, you can still add images to the entry body, but now they won’t have that ugly form tag. Not only is this…

Documentation Update

This week we’ll be previewing some of the new features of Movable Type 4.3 (try the Movable Type 4.3 beta). I’ll start the week off with a post on the my progress updating and improving the Movable Type documentation and Matt Jacobs, MT product manager, will be posting about other features of MT 4.3 later in the week. Intro In product documentation, the manual is the product. If a feature isn’t defined, it doesn’t exist as far as the user can tell. If a feature is described badly, the user will perceive the product to be a bad product. Thus, do not skimp on the documentation. Randal L. Schwartz, Perl author Documentation should be an integral part of the development of a new feature. It should start as a Specifications document, then be used for Quality Assurance testing of the feature, and then published publicly as the Official Documentation for the feature. Describing how a feature works provides new insight into how it could be coded better, reveals bugs, or gives inspiration to new features. Documentation is even important to the developers who wrote it as sometimes they have totally forgotten their strategy at the time, or perhaps their experience…

The Beta for Movable Type 4.3 is Now Open

Earlier this evening we made available the first pre-release version of Movable Type 4.3. For more information about this release, we’ve created an MT 4.3 beta page. There, you can find release notes, known issues, the download link and information on how to submit bugs and get involved in this release. Here’s what you should know: This release has most of 4.3’s new features, including comment pagination and a new entry asset manager. The first release is an alpha (MTOS-4.3a1) and we’ll have 2 more releases during the beta period. The final release will be in 3 weeks. While this release has been stable in our testing, remember this is alpha software and is not intended for use in a production environment. Last, but absolutely not least, we have overhauled the reference documentation for this release. Beau is going to post soon with more details about this, but we’ve already updated nearly 100 pages. He’ll also provide information about how you can get involved in improving the docs. Please download the alpha today and take it for a spin. We rely on input and contributions from community members to make these releases shine and hope you’ll have a hand in…

Looking ahead to MT5

We are happy to announce that MT5 is coming and invite you to participate. But first, here’s some information on what’s in store for Movable Type 4. Later this month, on July 29th, we’ll be releasing Movable Type 4.3. This release contains comment pagination, a variety of bug fixes and some significant performance and scalability improvements that make it the most robust release ever on MT. Tomorrow, we’ll make available our first pre-release build of 4.3. It will be an alpha, which means we’re still finishing up a few features and the software is absolutely not production ready. So why release it? We want all of you to give it a whirl and try out what we’ve been working on. As we approach the launch date, we’ll continue with several beta releases to fix any bugs found by you and our development team. I’ll have another post up tomorrow with links to the build and information on submitting bugs. In the meantime, work has begun on MT5. We have started the requirements process and early development work on MT5 with particular focus on better content management and ease of use. As we gear up towards the first Movable Type Pro…